Galt Niederhoffer '97 (Writer & Producer, HURRICANE STREETS, ROBOT & FRANK)
By D. Dona Le '05
"I’m always a writer first,” Galt Niederhoffer ’97 declares. "Producing is what I do during the day and writing is what I do at night.”
As a producer, director, and novelist, Niederhoffer achieved success at a young age—before she even graduated from Harvard College. She has produced over 20 films, 8 of them Sundance Film Festival selections & award winners. Niederhoffer wrote two original novels: A TAXONOMY OF BARNACLES (2005) and THE ROMANTICS (2008), which was later adapted into a 2010 movie. Her third novel will be published in Spring of 2013.
Her most recent film, ROBOT AND FRANK greatly impressed audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Niederhoffer is no stranger to success at Sundance. The first film she ever produced was HURRICANE STREETS, a project completed while she was on a leave of absence from Harvard. In 1997, HURRICANE STREETS won the Sundance awards for Audience, Best Director, and Best Cinematography.
Recounting why she left Harvard during her junior year, Niederhoffer explains, "I was your basic sophomore girl who had worked very hard in high school to get to Harvard, and by the time I got there, I was a little burnt out and I wasn’t applying myself.”
Like her father, hedge fund manager and famed squash player Victor Niederhoffer ‘64, she was on Harvard’s varsity squash team.
"It was a really demanding schedule. I got that all of these amazing lectures were being lost on me. I lacked focus, and I knew that I needed to recharge. Then my heart got broken for the first time. It all compounded and someone told me to take a break.”
So Niederhoffer returned to her parents’ home in New York, where she took a writing course at Columbia University with author Ben Marcus, and attended a workshop held in Astoria by Sam Lipsyte, another writer.
At the same time, Niederhoffer was meeting filmmakers and capitalized on a crucial era of independent filmmaking.
"Lots of talented people were coming out of New York University and Columbia, and there were a lot of great scripts around. The business of [independent films] was starting to boom. You could make a movie for a couple thousand dollars, and it might sell for a couple million.”
Niederhoffer started an internship at the French Film Office under Norwegian-American producer Gill Holland. Together, she and Holland founded a production company with the financial support of various investors, including her father. At this point, Niederhoffer was only 19 years old.
"I was interested in business, start-ups, and being entrepreneurial. It wasn’t so much about film for me as much as it was about business—a business for reading stories and telling stories.”
By the age of 23, Niederhoffer had produced seven films.
"I had a career on my hands. That first film [HURRICANE STREETS] had been a great case of beginner’s luck. I ran with the momentum, started learning on the job: how to raise money, how to cast the film, who the finance players were. I produced another movie or even two a year for the next four or five years.”
Such an intense level of success eventually led Niederhoffer back to Harvard. "I think I burnt out at that too. I was 25 and it was a very quick education in business and in this particular business, which was quite intense for a young woman. And to be in a position of authority at that young age as a woman was challenging. So I just have a policy—something I’ve learned from my parents—I like to finish what I start.”
Niederhoffer returned to Harvard in 2001, at 26, to complete the final three semesters of her undergraduate studies. Here, her novel writing took off while simultaneously taking The Victorian Novel and the last course Stephen J. Gould taught before his death.
"I had always liked books and stories as a kid, and when I was first at Harvard, I had tried my hand at a couple of really maudlin short stories. It was during that time I started writing a novel of my own: 300 pages of drivel that ended up in my desk drawer.”
But during her final semesters at Harvard, Niederhoffer reveals, "Something about studying Victorian science and the novel simultaneously sparked something in my mind, and that was when I wrote my first book.”
After graduating from Harvard, she founded a production company, Plum Pictures, with Celine Rattray and Daniela Taplin Lundberg. Plum Pictures focused on producing independent films.
Niederhoffer’s current production company is called Park Pictures, and its most recent success is ROBOT & FRANK, slated for release later this year after an excellent debut at Sundance.
Some people might wonder what exactly a producer’s responsibilities are. Niederhoffer’s short answer? "A producer does everything.”
She clarifies, "A producer is like an omniscient narrator. A producer starts with the script, which she finds and develops; this means cultivating the script and overseeing the writer, as the script improves—what a book editor does. Then, she casts the movie, approaching the agents and those people in the industry who control the actors. You have to do all this often before your financing is in place, gauging the budget that you have to spend on the cast by the value that the marketplace is on.
"And then you raise the money, which is a lot of fun, which is incredibly taxing and chaotic and worthy of an epic narrative of its own. You amass a budget, you create a budget, and you solicit funds to pay for the film. And then, you produce the film!”
Wait—there’s more.
"So then you make the film. You hire the crew, you hire the director, you’ve already worked with the writer, you’ve hired the cast. Then you engage the crew, and that’s a group of 50 people including everyone from the grips, cameramen, the cinematographers, line producers, production assistants, makeup/costume designers, truck drivers, etc. You pay these people, you design the schedule. They work for 5 days a week for 8 weeks on your shoot. You work 16-hour days. You manage the schedule so your days are met and you don’t exceed union rules. Then you wrap. Edit the movie. Things get a lot calmer. You have your editor and director in the room. Bring in the sound team and the colorist. And now these days, you don’t have to transfer your digital material to film, you submit to a festival. You hope you get in, and you try to create a bidding environment at the festival, which is very exciting.”
Given that Niederhoffer does the above for numerous projects, how does she find time to write?
"I approach writing the same way that I approach running and the way I approach sports, as a high school athlete and a college athlete. I just write three or four hours a day, every day. When I first started writing, I would do it in the morning after a cup of coffee and a walnut and raisin roll from Hi Rise. Now that I have two kids, I do it when they go to sleep, 9 to 1 in the morning.”
Niederhoffer currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children, Magnolia and Grover.
In addition to setting out time to write, Niederhoffer describes the scheduling challenges of having a successful career and being a mother.
"It’s a constant struggle. You have to be pretty regimented and at the same time totally flexible to changing times, changing demands. When you’re in production, you’re very busy with 12- to 14-hour days. When you’re not, things are calmer, and I can pick up my kids from school a couple days a week, take them to their cello lessons.”
Niederhoffer also relates her experience as a mother and a businesswoman to her work. Her second novel, THE ROMANTICS, is about a group of friends facing adulthood and its related challenges. Her third novel looks at the next phase of life - the challenges of marriage, motherhood, and divorce.
The book will be released in the summer or fall of 2012. Of course, she has numerous film productions in the works too, including adaptations of Sylvia Plath’s THE BELL JAR; Sam Lipsyte’s THE ASK; and David Foster Wallace’s short story, "Little Expressionless Animals.” Another film in development is THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorcese.
Niederhoffer is one of those fortunate individuals who enjoys a rich, multi-faceted career, each aspect of which is both challenging and satisfying.
"Directing and producing are two really wonderful vocations because they use so many different parts of your brain. As a director, one minute you’re a communicator, then manager, then an intricate detail-obsessed aesthetician. As a producer, the same is true. Businesswoman, the next minute you are a mediator, the next you are a lawyer. You have to work so many parts of your brain and every movie is its own business, its own political campaign.”
However, Niederhoffer does not describe the film industry as a red-carpet, exclusive business that only a few lucky people can access.
"Anyone can do it and there’s room for all types of people in this business. People who are smart and ambitious quickly rise to the top; it happens all the time. You need talented people around you to do your job well. People who are higher up are always looking for talented people.”
The proof is in Niederhoffer’s own career.